Realizing the ROI of Collaborative Healthcare Design and Delivery: Including Patients as Partners

As a healthcare executive, when you hear "patient engagement", do you imagine Meaningful Use reporting measures? As a clinician, do you think of patient portals and whether you've checked the inbound patient message queue in your EHR workflow? What do you think patients want or imagine when they think about engagement? Do you know how effective your "engagement" strategy is in driving individual clinical outcomes or population health, cost, patient satisfaction, or physician satisfaction? Have you considered how effective it COULD be?

What if your healthcare system could reimagine the engagement of care delivery, at each touchpoint of care - with patients and caregivers as partners in the design of the process, rather than simply consumers of the product?

I had an epiphany about this concept at HIMSS this year, when I realized that I, like so many in our industry, was high on the ubiquitous patient engagement and patient experience buzzwords that seem to signal progress towards a patient-centric approach to healthcare – but that patients were not represented, not only at the event, but in the process of healthcare system (and supporting technology) design. Too often, patients - while direct or indirect consumers of almost every product and service healthcare and related industries offer - are not considered (or treated as) integral partners.

My subsequent “a-ha” moment came when I became aware that it wasn’t enough for me to stamp my feet and complain about it; I had to be able to prove the positive financial ROI that could come from including patients as collaborators in their healthcare experience. I wrote about this concept here: ROI: Why Patients Weren't Included at HIMSS16, And Why They Will Be at HIMSS17.

Then, I set out to find organizations and individuals who have adopted this approach, who could bolster this notion that collaborative care design and delivery could be not only cost-effective, but provide competitive market advantage. And I did!

Now, I'm privileged to have the opportunity to bring some of them together to talk about how and why they did it - and what it's meant to their business, to their clinical teams, and to their patients. Even better, we have an amazing patient advocate joining us to provide the patient perspective; no talking ABOUT the patient WITHOUT the patient here. Many thanks to Jessica Johnson of Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Dr. Bruce Darrow of Mount Sinai Hospital, and Casey Quinlan of "Cancer for Christmas" (among other advocacy endeavors) for dedicating their time to educating us on overcoming the barriers to including patients as partners, and realizing ROI.

Want to join the conversation? Come and see us at the Healthcare CXO/CFO Summit October 16-18 in Marina del Rey, California.